In my own world, I do sense a lot less "pride" with using Perl. When I started at my company almost six years ago, Perl was at the forefront of our operational scripting and our data pre-processing steps. Now, our operational scripting has been replaced by a Java/Spring/web services based system, and our data pre-processing is mostly done in Java. People just look at you funny if you decide to propagate Perl. Your title of cutting the supply lines rings true. Maybe in twenty years, when I hit sixty, I can cash in on that big legacy Perl gig.

You wrote a pretty provocative piece, and I'll keep an eye out for this generality. I don't track programmer language demographics, but at the company where I'm at, they're REDUCING the use of Perl. Perl is still present in a bunch of legacy stuff, and in the deep underbelly of some of our operational scripting, but Java and XML and all the "sexy new stuff" (as I like to call it) has taken over.